Tclslides User's Manual

by Rildo Pragana <rpragana@acm.org>

 

 

Introduction

Tclslides is a program to allow several machines follow a live presentation without any client-side program, except for a Netscape or Mozilla browser with javascript enabled. On the server side, a tcl script control the presentation, sending commands to show slides or arbitrary images, text or html formatted files. It features also a simple shell controlled at the server side, but viewable through all connected clients. The full program is composed of two scripts, tclslides.cgi , that must be installed as a regular cgi script under Apache or other web server cgi-bin directory; and slides-srv the main visual interface and command server for the former.
The Tclslides program is licensed under the GPL (General Public License).

Installation

To install Tclslides, you have to put tclslides.cgi in your web server cgi-bin directory and check the file permissions. That's all! Client browsers will only have access to the slides or other documents when the server program, slides-srv, is running.
Each client will open a local connection from the cgi script to the server program and will be added to the server's client list.

Main Window

Let us look at the main window of slides-srv to understand its elements:
  fig1 - slides-srv main window
main window

Starting at the bottom, we see an entry box with a url skeleton for the image(s) or slide(s) we want to show.  The string %C will be replaced by the actual page or slide we are presenting. Below that we have an entry at the left with the page number to show, besides several buttons. We may edit the page number directly there, in the entry, or advance forward by pressing the button labelled next . To go back one slide, we may press the button labeled prev . In the event it is displaying the wrong thing, or after we manually change the page, we press the reread button. The remaining buttons are for showing what clients (browsers) are connected to our server (button written show clients) or to change the slide collection we are presenting now.
 If you want to give it a try quickly, just edit the larger entry (the url for the image, as we told before) and press the reread button. Each browser connected to our cgi script will show the image url entered.

File Menu

file menu The file menu have the commands Open, New and Save, to manage text or html files. There are also commands to seNd a regular non-marked-up file to the clients, to send htMl formmated file and to start an interactive sHell thall all clients will see. The last commands are to add a bookmark, that will become available in the bookmarks menu, if it isn't already there, and the exit command.  When the program is started for the first time, the bookmarks menu will be empty. Visit some files and add a bookmark for each of them and the menu will grow.
Here is a sample bookmarks menu:

 

Edit menu

The edit menu have the usual cut, copy and paste operations, besides a simple search function that is very easy to use and have no fancy options. The slide-srv program also works like a simple text editor, so we may add text to the text panel (the larger area in the main window) and save the resulting text as a new document. Beware the command File->New will clean up everything. Use File->Save to save your new document.

Config menu


The config menu shows a number lines checkbox. If this is checked, the text send will insert line numbers before each text line. This is useful to present a source listing (say a C program) refering to the lines. Then you may choose from several alternative fonts for the text viewing in the control program. This selection will not change nothing at he sent text. The Save Config command may be used to make sure we don't lose our configuration, including window position and size. This is not often needed, because the normal exit of the program also saves the configuration parameters.

Here is a Netscape window with a remotelly controlled slide displayed: